Project Members

Antonia Soriente

Bilingual Child Language Acquisition

In this project the acquisition of bilingualism by various children in different linguistic environment was studied. One subproject investigated an Italian/Indonesian situation, and another an Indonesian/Javanese bilingual setting.

In the first subproject, the acquisition of bilingualism of two children, Guglielmo and Beatrice, was studied. While their mother is a native speaker of Italian, their father is Indonesian. Although they lived in a largely Indonesian-speaking environment, they were exclusively addressed by their mother in Italian. It represented a case study of unbalanced bilingualism and focuses on the development of a number of morphosyntactic patterns. It tried to identify cross-linguistic structures in quantitative and qualitative perspectives and hypothesizes theoretical explanations for cross-linguistic influence and the gradual emergence of correct usage of Italian and Indonesian grammatical structures.

The children were video-recorded on a weekly basis. Sessions alternated between predominantly Indonesian with the father, predominantly Italian with the mother, and mixed. For each child, the recordings began at the age of 8 months and stopped when the children were 4 and 6 years respectively. In addition, a diary study was conducted, focussing on utterances exhibiting a mixture of Indonesian and Italian forms. Topics analysed included the acquisition of negation and the study of mixed forms produced by the bilingual child, the acquisition of Wh-forms and of temporal markers.

Further, the acquisition of bilingualism by Ramzi was studied. Although both parents of Ramzi are natives of East Java, his mother spoke to him in Indonesian while his father spoke to him in Javanese. The child was video-recorded on a weekly basis.